New Orleans after the Promises

Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society

Kent B. Germany

Publication Year: 2007

In the 1960s and 1970s, New Orleans experienced one of the greatest transformations in its history. Its people replaced Jim Crow, fought a War on Poverty, and emerged with glittering skyscrapers, professional football, and a building so large it had to be called the Superdome. New Orleans after the Promises looks back at that era to explore how a few thousand locals tried to bring the Great Society to Dixie. With faith in God and American progress, they believed that they could conquer poverty, confront racism, establish civic order, and expand the economy. At a time when liberalism seemed to be on the wane nationally, black and white citizens in New Orleans cautiously partnered with each other and with the federal government to expand liberalism in the South.

As Kent Germany examines how the civil rights, antipoverty, and therapeutic initiatives of the Great Society dovetailed with the struggles of black New Orleanians for full citizenship, he defines an emerging public/private governing apparatus that he calls the "Soft State": a delicate arrangement involving constituencies as varied as old-money civic leaders and Black Power proponents who came together to sort out the meanings of such new federal programs as Community Action, Head Start, and Model Cities. While those diverse groups struggled--violently on occasion--to influence the process of racial inclusion and the direction of economic growth, they dramatically transformed public life in one of America's oldest cities. While many wonder now what kind of city will emerge after Katrina, New Orleans after the Promises offers a detailed portrait of the complex city that developed after its last epic reconstruction.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

I was born and raised in Louisiana. Like most people from there, my
roots go back several generations—at least four in my case. In August
and September 2005, I watched the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita from an upscale university town in Virginia and felt like an exile.
I want to express my deepest sympathy for the people along the Gulf...

Introduction: Something New for the South?

It took less than a week to end New Orleans as we knew it. The wind
came and the water came and the levees could not keep them away. In
August 2005, the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain returned to
long-ago shores, and people had to head to higher ground. Hurricane Katrina
made nomads out of over a half-million people, and it eroded faith...

Part One: A War on Poverty, Segregation, and Alienation, 1964–1974

Locally, the politics of the Great Society became a matter of calculating
black potential and black peril. There are many examples of both, but two
instances stand out, serving as the symbolic opening and closing of this
history. One involved a little black girl named Ruby Bridges, the other a
young black man named Mark Essex...

1. A European-African-Caribbean-American-Southern City

New Orleans began in 1718 as a gamble made by French aristocrats.
In time, the decision to create a European community in a subtropical
river delta devastated thousands, perhaps millions, of lives, but built a
civilization that guided the growth of the New World. In a pattern repeated
throughout the city's history, mercantile dreams beat out the...

2. Establishing the Early War on Poverty

In the 1960s, Louisiana was home to some of the least educated, most
poorly paid, and most persistently violent citizens in the United States.
The Bayou State led the nation in overall illiteracy and had the fourth
highest black illiteracy rate. In New Orleans, 35 percent of residents
had less than an eighth grade education. Statewide, infants died at a rate...

3. Building Community Action

Community action was supposed to empower the supposedly powerless.
One of the drafters of the Economic Opportunity Act, William B. Cannon,
intended it to be "a method of organizing local political action," not
just a means of repackaging social services. Adam Yarmolinsky, one of the
chief architects of the poverty legislation and a speechwriter for...

4. Challenging the Establishment and the Color Line

In 1966 and 1967, local organizers used community action to build political
power, and they turned the social policy process into an extension of
civil rights activism. Challenges to the "establishment" helped to shift bureaucratic
influence from white progressives to black neighborhood leaders.
At the forefront were neighborhood women who wanted better living...

5. Making Better and Happier Citizens

While community action was helping to build structures for black political
inclusion after Jim Crow, an equally important question was being
worked out at an intellectual level: Why should black residents be included
as full citizens? The answer, judging from the ideas of local progressives,
was that alienated and segregated people reduced...

6. Defusing the Southern Powder Keg

Between 1963 and 1968, the United States experienced an urban crisis. In
over 250 American cities, at least 334 episodes of urban unrest erupted,
nearly 90 percent of them between 1967 and 1968. During those six
years, approximately 250 African Americans were killed, 8,000 were injured,
and 50,000 were arrested. A sizeable portion of the injuries and...

7. Making Workers and Jobs

In the middle and late 1960s, the unemployment rate in the United States
was at one of its lowest points in history. Roughly 3.5 percent of Americans
were reported to be out of work. In New Orleans that number was only
slightly higher at 4.2 percent. For New Orleans's black neighborhoods,
however, the rate hovered near 10 percent, and the underemployment...

8. Making Groceries

They came for groceries. In August 1969, a reported three hundred welfare
recipients, most of whom were female African Americans, made their
way over land and water to the New Orleans Civic Center complex to
collect on an offer of free food and shoes. At least, that is how the day
started. The rest of the story is a bit cloudy, but, after a short while, the...

9. Making a Model New Orleans [Contains Image Plates]

In 1965 and 1966, several black neighborhood leaders complained that
their areas were ignored by a disinterested Mayor Victor Hugo Schiro.
By mid-April 1968, however, target-area residents had forced City Hall
to take notice. Victor Schiro finally targeted the "slums" as a serious problem.
According to the mayor, target areas contained only 25 percent of...

Part Two: Black Power and Dixie’s Democratic Moment, 1968–1974

A militant black activist stood in front of his house and handed a sack
of beer to his friends. Two New Orleans police officers witnessed the
exchange. Using the police department's "Stop and Frisk" policy, they
rushed in to demand that the man, Lionel McIntyre, reveal the contents
of his container. Someone in his group demanded a search warrant, to...

10. The Thugs United and the Politics of Manhood

During the late 1960s, New Orleans experienced an intense political
transformation. It was the democratic moment that black leaders had
wanted for so long. The conditions for creating something new for the
South were finally set. Competition on the streets, in the bureaucracies,
and at the polls would determine what kind of city emerged from the...

11. Women, Welfare, and Political Mobilization

Generalizing about men and women is dangerous business. In the late
1960s, however, a few trends in local black activism do stand out. In particular,
organizations and/or activities that focused on black capitalism or
political mobilization (e.g., negotiating construction contracts, running
for public office) were almost always led by men. As advocates of black...

12. Acronyms, Liberalism, and Electoral Politics, 1969–1971

The election season of 1969–1970 was a test of racial liberalism. Black
voters, primarily organized by neighborhood councils and political groups
that this study refers to as the Acronyms, put the racially liberal Moon
Landrieu in the mayor's office. Seven years after the New Orleans Police
Department dragged civil rights activists out of City Hall by their...

13. Panthers, Snipers, and the Limits of Liberalism

In 1964, a half-decade before Moon Landrieu's election, New Orleans
Urban League director J. Harvey Kerns had hoped that racial liberalism
could produce "something new for the South." At the dawn of the
new decade, New Orleans seemed poised to do that, or at least to end
the Dixie defined by Jim Crow. As several moments of violence...

Conclusion: Prelude to Katrina

In New Orleans, keeping faith in progress can be hard to do. Many people
there have found it easier to put their confidence in things unseen and in
life beyond life. In 1973, the Essex episode demonstrated that one man
with a few dozen bullets could shut down a city at one of the most optimistic
moments in its history. Thirty-two years later, Hurricane Katrina...

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